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The Japanese had their haikus.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets.
We... have PowerPoint presentations.
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PowerPoint has its detractors, but blaming it for bad presentations is like blaming fountain pens for bad poetry.
The *real* problem with PowerPoint and its open source equivalents...
...is that they aren't web-friendly.
What would represent the internet?
If you export a slideshow as a web page...
...what you actually get is a bunch of images.
There aren't actually any words in these images.
There are just pixels that happen to be arranged in patterns...
...our eyes and brains can translate into letters.
Search engines can't read this text. Neither can accessibility aids for the visually impaired.
? ? ? ?
And those things that look like hyperlinks? They're not---they're just more pixels.
? ? ? ?
One solution is to use HTML5 and Javascript to create real web-native content.
But these are even worse than PowerPoint when it comes to making everything a bunch of bullet points.
HTML5 doesn't let you draw on top of your text the way you would on a whiteboard or in PowerPoint.
(Well technically speaking you can if you superimpose a canvas element and position things correctly but that's very fragile, doesn't improve accessibility and is still opaque to search engines so we don't regard it as a solution.)
The goal of the Slide Drive project is to create a real web-native presentation tool.
To do this, we're taking advantage of Popcorn, which provides a Javascript event framework for HTML5...
...and Butter, an authoring tool built on top of Popcorn.
We're also using LibreOffice Impress as a front end. It provides all the slideshow creation tools we need...
...and knows how to convert presentations in other formats, particularly PowerPoint.
Here's how it all works.
Workflow
Step 1: create a presentation using LibreOffice.
Workflow
using the export tools that Marco Cecchetti has been building, save the presentation as SVG. This creates a single document with one SVG diagram per slide, along with metadata about the desired transition effects.
Workflow
Step 3: drag and drop the slideshow onto Butter to import it.
Step 4: edit the slideshow in Butter.
Workflow
For example, if you want to synchronize with a voiceover, you can import the MP3...
Workflow MP3
...then stretch and shrink the slides to line up with time marks.
Workflow MP3
Why is this a better solution?
?
Because everything on your screen is native web content.
? !
Pause this slideshow for a second and click on this link.
http://www.example.com/#slide-xyz
It worked, didn't it? It opened a page in a new tab, and it restarted this slideshow.
http://www.example.com/#slide-abc (Screenshot goes here)
Now pause this show again and click on the link in that other tab.
That's right: you can hyperlink into a presentation, just like you can hyperlink into a particular section of a web page.
http://www.example.com/#slide-abc (Screenshot goes here)
And when you copy and paste, you get the text you expect, rather that a section of an image.
Now, nothing's perfect. We still have issues with:
Issues Rich slide transitions and animations (blushing clip art goes here)
Issues Rich slide transitions and animations Custom font support (blushing clip art goes here)
Issues Rich slide transitions and animations Custom font support Performance and compatibility in some browsers (blushing clip art goes here)
But we hope this short demo has shown you what we're doing, and the tremendous potential it has.
Issues Rich slide transitions and animations Custom font support Performance and compatibility in some browsers Embedded audio and video (blushing clip art goes here)
If you'd like to learn more, or help us out, please go to http://github.com/dseif/slide-drive Thank you for your time.
http://github.com/dseif/slide-drive
But we hope this short demo has shown you what we're doing, and the tremendous potential it has.